The American-Made Child Army in Africa

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/30240-the-american-made-child-army-in-africa

Approximately 13,000 children have been recruited into armed groups in South Sudan, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). In addition, about 400,000 youngsters have been forced out of school due to the civil war that has been flaring and simmering there for almost a year and a half. How so many children came to be affected by the conflict and why so many of them find themselves serving in the national army, the main rebel force, and other militias needs to be explained. It has much to do with civil wars that started in the 1950s and lasted for the better part of five decades, pitting rebels in the south against the government in the north of what was then a single country: Sudan.

Other factors include the 2005 peace deal that led to an independent South Sudan and transformed a guerrilla force into a national military, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army or SPLA; a rural culture in which cows are king because they are currency and young boys are armed to defend against cattle raids, as well as to conduct them; and an armed grudge match between political rivals representing different tribal groups in South Sudan that began in December 2013. Add all of this together and any tangible recent progress toward ridding South Sudan of the scourge of child soldiers has been obliterated.

Oh yes, and into that mix you would also have to factor the United States, a country that, as then U.S. Senator, now Secretary of State John Kerry put it, helped “midwife” South Sudan into existence.

[1939]

1. Since the northern Sudanese were terrorizing the southern Sudnaese

Diplomatically helping the southern Sudanese gaining independence was seen as a "good thing". South Sudan's failure politically to is hardly the fault of the US (unless we were supposed to make it as "protectorate" and guide them for forty years until they were "mature enough" for real independence).

[eridani]

2. If intervention makes it worse, then why do it? n/t

[1939]

3. Sometimes you don't know ahead of time.

There was significant sentiment on the left for sending a US armed force to Darfur. How would that have worked out?

What would have been the consequences of the US not getting into World War One? My personal belief is that Germany, Britain, and France would have reached a peace of mutual exhaustion and maybe there would have been no rise of Hitler and the Nazis.